[NOTE: Contents of this post have been edited heavily to focus more on the topic at hand, and less on the topic that spawned my consideration of the issues. Also derailing comments have been deleted.]
So this morning I was reading at post over a Pumping Irony where Scott was talking about LOTRO Executive Producer Jeffrey Steefel’s interview of a couple days ago. I thought Scott made some good points (which I won’t re-iterate here, but I encourage you to go read the post) so I left a kind of an ‘atta boy!’ comment.
But being a dumbass, I couldn’t stop there, and questioned some of what another commenter had posted. Which began a back and forth of us each spinning our wheels and getting nowhere. Now don’t get me wrong, it was a civil discussion, but ultimately pointless and a waste of both our times. He wasn’t convincing me and I wasn’t convincing him.
It’s not worth regurgitating the whole debate, which spilled over to this blog and devolved even further. There’s no structure in blog comments, no ‘rules of engagement’ and meanings of common terms are often not clearly defined. To take the time to define them is cumbersome when you don’t even know for sure the other party is coming back.
It was a frustrating discussion for me; it was like the other party was from a totally different culture and we had no common ground to base the discussion on. Some of his points made as much sense to me as someone saying “We have corn flakes when moon dust wallows green penguins irately. ” First he would say one thing then he’d say completely the opposite, or so it seemed to me. It got to the point where I could only surmise he was debating for the sake of debating, not worrying about reasoning or consistency, but just trying to be an irritant. Perhaps he felt the same way about me.
Anyway, my point about this, beyond just needing to vent my frustration, is to ask this question:
Are comments on blogs really of any value, or are they just a place to fritter away time talking to each other, but not listening to each other? I don’t mean to vilify this dude, because the fact is I was certain of myself too, and he wasn’t going to budge my opinion either.
So what’s the point? Have you ever been swayed by a discussion in blog comments? Or are they all just a waste of bandwidth? Should we all turn them off and save ourselves the hassle of combating the spammers?
I have felt this way communicating to people sometimes, but really it all usually boils down to is me needing to be a little more patient and others needing to be a little more flexible. Don’t give up on communicating with people just because one person burns you. That’s all I’m sayin’.
Comments are absolutely worth it. Openedge1 accused me of making it personal, but I didn’t see it that way. That’s the great thing — how everyone sees the same data differently because of our own experiences, expectations and perceptions.
It’s great to have a conversation. I *LOVE* when people participate in any of my posts, just as I love participating in other blogs. Sometimes things become a debate, and that’s fine too. It’s great to see different sides of the same coin. I don’t really care for when things devolve into arguments and flame wars, however.
But while we should express our own opinions and views, we should try to at least accept that others have their own and that they may be different than our own. I don’t try to make it a goal of mine to convince everyone to change their opinions to match mine. I’m not a right-wing blogevangelist out to superimpose my view and my will over others…
I read much, and am convinced of much. Of course, I mentally take it all in, aggregate it, and feed it through a thousand filters to gain the most useful bits out of it. But at the end of the day, information is information, no matter where it comes from.
(Long pointless and off topic debate deleted.)
We could always go back to a time where the only information we could get was from the bias of gaming mags alone!?
Eventually, publishers & developers will see the worth of blogs/sites that discuss games & gaming in our own unique way. We all have something worth saying but sometimes it takes time to find it.